Posts tagged ‘Strategy’
A strategy is just a dream if you don’t have a roadmap to follow.
Most companies have a vision, many have a strategy, but so many fail on the execution. Why is that? The most fundamental reason is because of a lack of clear plan, alignment, and change management. If a company has a brilliant strategy, but no roadmap for how to get there- or a lack of alignment across the organization, it isn’t a strategy. It’s a dream.
So let’s talk about how to structure your strategy:
Strategic planning
Articulate your Vision. Start with the end in mind. What do you want to be when you grow up? This can include a conceptual and/or a financial vision. Set your sights high.
Plan your strategy. It starts with workshopping and documenting these key concepts:
- Who are your constituents? What do they care about? How are you serving them today? How do you want to be able to serve them in the future?
- What data do you need to support the strategy? Market considerations, competitive set, and more.
- Where do you need to win to grow?
- What are the key gaps or areas that you need to build or fix to get there?
- Where do you need to innovate to deliver compelling value?
- What tools, technology, people and resources are needed to execute?
- What has to change? Processes, ways of working, mindset.
- Alignment: Cross functional commitment & alignment is a necessary step before ratifying your strategy.
Build your Roadmap
- Strategic plan & Timeline: build out a 1-3 year business roadmap showing the phasing, key projects, technology and features that will be delivered to support your strategy.
- Financials: what are the investment and return expectations for year 1,2 and 3? How are you going to drive value quickly, while building long term equity?
- Key requirements: what are the must-haves? The nice-to-haves?
- Operational needs: Activate the resources, tools and organizational requirements needed to support the first phase
- RACI: Who are the project sponsors? Who are the core team members? Who’s accountable for what? Responsible?
- Change management: This needs to start early on to ensure that you have organizational alignment, to enable teams to surface and address concerns or obstacles, identify processes and other challenges that need to be addressed to deliver each project successfully.
Begin to execute:
Once your strategic roadmap is complete, it’s time to execute. At a high level, you’d need to validate your roadmap to assess what’s achievable on your timeline. Align on what’s more important- timeline or budget.
- Validate your timeline and prioritization for phase 1
- Create detailed requirements & project plans
- Identify Program and project managers
- Identify Vendors or partners
- Validate RACI
- Change Management
- Identify test & learn strategies
- Scheduled check-ins and executive updates
- Meet quarterly to review progress against the roadmap, and to validate future phasing.
Assess & evaluate where you need to pivot. What has changed in the marketplace, company performance or other factors? What innovations could be gamechangers?
- Assess & evaluate your roadmap & timeline. Has anything changed that could (or should) impact your timeline or priorities? Consider market forces, company imperatives, innovation…
- You should be prepared to pivot and refine as you learn. Your roadmap is a guideline- not a fixed plan that is set in stone.
- Watch the scope creep- Your program and project managers should keep the team focused on project scope, but inevitably, new ideas will arise. MOST should be put in a prioritized backlog for future phasing. The core team needs to surface and evaluate ideas to determine whether they are in-scope, need to be prioritized for future scope, or worth adding to project scope- considering what you could remove from scope to keep the project on track.
That’s a starter list for you! Feel free to bookmark it.
I help companies of all sizes articulate brand vision, strategies- and to execute. For help with yours, see https://jessjacksonconsulting.com/
For more, watch this space.
But it’s not easy.
Scenario: You set out to make a list of the top 3 strategic initiatives and end up with 20. You just can’t help adding the rejects to the bottom of the list…or the little things. Just in case they make it. It makes everyone feel better to have them captured, so you keep them. But in fact, there’s nothing so demoralizing for the team as the list that never gets done. We need to stop thinking of it that way.
The top initiatives are just that. It doesn’t have to include the little things. The little things are the things we do everyday to support the big things.
Does your company excel at identifying the top few things? One company I worked for called it the “critical few initiatives”. It made it very clear, at all levels of the organization, how to make the right decision about what to focus on, everyday.
It’s not so different from having a clear brand position: once you have it, everyone can use it as a guiding light for behavior, decisions and how they articulate the voice of the brand and apply it to what they specifically do every day.
But why is it so hard to do? How do you do it well?
It’s hard because it requires sacrifice. You can’t do it all at once, with the resources you have. You have to know what’s really important. Startups do this everyday- they have a few good people laser-focused on a clear goal. So they get it done. I’ve been with big companies and little companies, and I can tell you that it’s not size that defines a clear business strategy- it’s courage. That’s right- it’s the courage to take a stand on what’s going to drive your business forward, rather than a mega diner-sized menu that will have something for everyone, and nothing spectacular for anyone.
J.Crew does this extraordinarily well.
Mickey Drexler, in one of his recent features in Fast Company, says: “Simplicity is very difficult to achieve.” But he has done it- over the past 10 years, with Jenna Lyons as the extraordinary creative lead- they have completely reinvented one of America’s favorite brands. They have a vision, and it has paid off, big time- with Michelle Obama and Jessie Jackson (this Jessie, not the reverend), among many others, as devoted fans to the brand. Why? They don’t do just what’s expected. They keep it fresh and creative. And they don’t try to have something for everyone. Each collection has a point of view. It has become the single most coveted American fashion brand at an affordable price point. You don’t achieve that by being indecisive about your priorities. You can find links to Fast Company’s recent features on Mickey and Jenna, here.
Learning Agile Methodologies helped shape my thinking about how to keep it simple. It’s a flexible, yet highly structured way to prioritize and execute on an on-going basis. It requires decisive action and attention on a daily basis to remain focused. And you can still keep your wish list (your backlog), on the fringes to pull from when each new sprint planning meeting comes up. This isn’t a long term strategic planning tool- but it’s a great way to organize the work to support your key strategies. What it does for strategic planning is give you a better sense of how much time things take- how to structure the research around your plans and whether they’re achievable in the desired time period. It’s a great way to support your strategy company wide, and keep everyone focused.
But it all starts with keeping it simple. You have to start by defining the high level goals. And then constructing a plan of the things you need to have in place to get there. And then editing, editing, editing down the list to the things that REALLY matter. And then staying focused, every day, on those things.
It’s not easy, to plan to do less. But what I’ve found in the past year is that planning to do less actually empowers you to do more- both because you don’t have to rethink your priorities every single day, and because you make a bigger impact with a few great things than with a zillion insignificant ones.
jess blogs 